Chapter 2 In ‘darkest Hungary’ In 1944 an intriguing little book entitled In Darkest Hungary was published in the series ‘Left Book Club Editions’ in London. Its author was the little-known G. Pálóczy-Horváth, but the introduction was written by none other than Michael (Mihály) Károlyi, the exiled former president of the short-lived democratic republic of Hungary that existed from November 1918 to March 1919. Károlyi explains that the book was written by Pálóczy-Horváth in collaboration with a Hungarian peasant and that the author ‘unfolds before us the history of the disinherited Hungarian peasantry, thus shedding light upon a sombre landscape. Indeed, in this book the Chinese wall is blasted behind which the world of feudal Hungary lay hidden’.27 The style and manner of presentation of the book does indeed suggest that it is a man of the common people who is speaking to us, informing the reader about the social, economic, and political conditions in the Hungarian countryside. But there is also a general understanding of the course of Hungarian and European history, which betrays the hand of a Hungarian intellectual or educated political figure. The book is written more or less from the standpoint of ‘agrarian socialism’, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hungary a political rival of social democracy, and also from a Magyar (ethnic-Hungarian) perspective. Among other things, mention is made of strikes of Magyar agricultural labourers in central Hungary in 1897 and 1905-6, which were defeated by the landowners with the help of Slovak, Romanian, and Serb strike-breakers. ‘These foreigners were actually paid the wages we were asking for’, says the unknown peasant co-author of In Darkest Hungary – ‘Do you understand our lords? We don’t’.28 Perhaps it would be wrong to say that the book is characterised by Magyar chauvinism given the sense of injustice, social exclusion, and class antagonism transpiring through its pages. However, it is suggested by the author himself that there existed a strong national consciousness among the Magyar agricultural proletariat and poor peasantry, indeed, that these social classes were suffering from a kind of wounded pride because of their political exclusion from a nation that was entirely dominated by the gentry and aristocracy.29 The Hungarian ruling class (‘our lords’) is even accused of ‘treason’ for their constantly importing ‘foreign workers’ (in fact, fellow-Hungarian workers from other ethnic groups, mostly poor migrants and seasonal labourers) and for having ‘chased to America… 1,500,000 Hungarians’. It is argued that if they had not done this, ‘there would not have been a mixed population problem in Hungary, or at least the problem would have been much smaller’.30 This claim is rather bizarre, because among the emigrants leaving for America from Hungary there were disproportionately large numbers of Slovaks, Ruthenians, and other non-Magyars.31 If these statements by the authors of In Darkest Hungary reflected the true feelings of a significant section of the Magyar proletariat, it must be concluded that in Hungary 27 Michael Károlyi, ‘Introduction’, in G. Pálóczy-Horváth, In Darkest Hungary, London 1944, p. 5. 28 Pálóczy-Horváth, In Darkest Hungary, pp. 88-90, and p. 88 for quotation. 29 Thus we read on p. 90: ‘Is it strange that we did not feel we belonged to the Hungarian nation? After all, this nation constantly defended herself against us by importing Rumanians, Poles and Serbs. We – the people – were the enemies of the nation.’ The nation had been usurped by, and was immorally identified with, the ruling class and its interests. 30 Ibid., p. 93. 31 J. Puskás, ‘Emigration from Hungary to the United States before 1914’, in Études historiques hongroises 1975, 2 vols, vol. 2, pp. 90-1; Julianna Puskás, ‘Overseas Emigration from Hungary and the National Minorities, 1880-1914’, in Ethnicity and Society in Hungary, ed. Ferenc Glatz, Budapest, 1990, pp. 284-5, 296-9; Tibor Frank, ‘From Austria-Hungary to the United States: National Minorities and Emigration 1880-1914’, Nationalities Papers 24, no. 3, 1996, pp. 409, 416. These publications show that more than two-thirds of those who left Hungary between 1899 and 1913 were non-Magyars, the percentage of Slovaks lying between twenty- five and thirty-three percent of the total. 33 exploitation and class oppression did by no means eliminate national pride and national consciousness among the poor and the working class.32 Indeed, even less than among the Magyars was this the case among workers and peasants belonging to ‘nationalities’ (national minorities) like the Slovaks or the Romanians, who were constantly made aware of their national identity by the Hungarian policy of harsh national oppression. In Darkest Hungary illustrates the complex relationship between social, ethnic, and political factors in multinational Hungary during the era of Austro-Hungarian ‘Dualism’ following the Compromise of 1867. In this chapter I will try to identify some of the principal features of the ‘semi-feudal’ society of Dualist Hungary in order to understand the social and political conditions in which the Hungarian social democratic movement emerged. I will pay attention to questions of social structure and political regime and, in particular, to the consequences of national inequality, forcible assimilation and denationalisation (‘Magyarisation’), and political repression. I will try to show how these problems influenced both the Magyars and the subordinate ‘nationalities’ and how they helped to shape the outlook and political strategy of Hungarian social democracy. The course of developments during the period 1867-1918 culminated in the revolutionary crisis of 1918. Although it is possibly too simple to say that the political crisis and national revolution of 1918 were the inevitable outcome of a half- century of escalating national and social conflicts, the final collapse of multinational ‘Historical Hungary’ would never have happened without these earlier events. The last year of the First World War was the crucial moment when the manifold social and political contradictions in Hungary came inexorably to a head, making revolutionary upheaval almost predictable. When investigating the trend of developments during the decades preceding the disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy and Historical Hungary I found it especially useful to look at the material in the still highly instructive work of R.W. Seton-Watson, ‘Racial Problems in Hungary’ (1908), as well as other publications of this remarkable Scottish contemporary historian of early twentieth- century Eastern Europe. The undiminished importance of Seton-Watson’s book on Hungary is shown, among other things, by the fact that a new Slovak translation was published in the 1990s. Another important contemporary analyst of the complexities of old multinational Hungary who still deserves our attention is the critical Hungarian social scientist (and politician) Oszkár Jászi, whose publications cannot fail to inform any serious student of the subject.33 Multinational post-Compromise Hungary was a peculiar social and political formation in which an essentially traditional social class, the Magyar middle nobility (‘gentry’) and aristocracy who claimed to represent the historical interests of the state and of the dominant Magyar nation, ruled supreme. The Hungary ruled by this gentry class has often been defined as ‘semi-feudal’.34 This definition may seem somewhat vague and unsatisfactory, but should convey the crucial fact 32 The Hungarian historian Ernő Kabos points out that the agrarian socialist movement, which had influence even among some urban workers, gradually shifted to the right and to a nationalist position; see Ernő Kabos, ‘The Links between the Social Democratic Party of Hungary and the Trade Unions from 1890 to 1914’, in Studies on the History of the Hungarian Trade-Union Movement, eds E. Kabos and A. Zsilák, Budapest, 1977, p. 51. 33 Apart from the publications of Seton-Watson and Jászi, which have a special quality, my understanding of the course of Hungarian and Slovak history is informed by three types of historical literature: works on the general history of the Habsburg Monarchy (especially those by Robert Kann); works on the modern political and social history of Hungary in Western languages and Slovak (e.g., those by Ignotus, Pamlényi, Sugar, Hoensch, and the different Hungarian writers on labour history); and works on the history of Slovakia and the Slovaks (a wide range of Slovak publications). Their full titles will be given in the notes below or in the following chapters. The Slovak translation of Seton-Watson’s classical work ‘Racial Problems in Hungary’ was published under the title Národnostná otázka v Uhorsku, Bratislava 1994. 34 The term was used already by contemporary Hungarian social democratic leaders like Zsigmond Kunfi, and is even used by cultural historians; see, e.g., William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind. An Intellectual and Social History 1848-1938, Berkeley 1972, p. 342. 34 that the country’s social structure and political order were a strange mix of the atavistic and the quasi-modern. Apart from a small number of large aristocratic landowners who successfully modernised their agricultural production, the traditional nobility – a sizeable stratum representing more than five percent of the total Hungarian and almost 12.5 percent of the Magyar population, including the numerous impoverished lower nobility – was an economically declining class that during the nineteenth century developed a modern ‘national-liberal’ ideology associated with the revolution of 1848 and the name of the Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth.35 The virtual absence of a modern middle-class among the Magyars – most urban social positions and modern economic activities were controlled by German-speakers and Jews – meant that the Magyar middle and lesser nobility, the traditional champion of Hungary’s political autonomy, took on the task of fighting for constitutional reform and national independence instead of the bourgeoisie.